Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Debuts on the National Mall [VIDEO]

The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington D.C., has officially opened to the public. The memorial will be formally dedicated on Aug. 28 — the anniversary of his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech — and will cap a five-day celebration that could draw as many as 250,000 people.

Located near the Tidal Basin, where the cherry blossoms bloom, the $120 million memorial to the civil rights leader will be the only one on the mall that doesn’t honor a president or a war. Visitors will enter through a split boulder, called the Mountain of Despair, and walk out onto an open plaza. There they will discover a 30-foot granite sculpture of King and a wall etched with excerpts from his speeches.

“Martin Luther King is not only a hero of Americans, he also is a hero of the world and he pursued the universal dream of the people of the world,” Lei Yixin, the Chinese master sculptor who created the King statue, told USA Today.